It is really hard to find good terminal colours for both light and dark themes.
I've replaced uses of 'bright' colours with bold as it seems to work better. git-diff does the same thing.
Explicit black and white colours are available, but you can't assume the default colour!
miniblog.
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I'm experimenting with a patch-style display format for difftastic.
What do you think? Do the colours work? What about the last example, where there's only whitespace changes and the syntactic diff has nothing to highlight?
I'm surprised that there are no ML tools for automatic log highlighting. Logs often have repetitive patterns that lend themselves to distinct colours.
Do any such tools exist?
@krinkle@mastodon.technology I don't know of anyone using difftastic by default, including me! (I use it >50% of the time though.)
I toyed with background colours but I didn't find anything that I really liked. Contrast is hard, and depends on the user's theme.
Background colours look bad with syntax highlighting (e.g. red background with blue comment text).
It also looked silly due to ignoring whitespace between symbols.
It's an interesting space and I'm still experimenting :)


